It was a beautiful day in Washington. A warm breeze smelled as green as summer. Outside the grocery store are flats of primroses to plant. Fuzzy pussywillow buds are cracking open their protective shells, and on other bushes, tiny, wrinkled leaflets are slowly unfurling into leaves. Even my spring jacket is hanging unused in the closet. And it’s January.
This seems to be business as usual in the Northwest. On New Year’s, after the local news team covered the fireworks exploding off the Space Needle, their weatherman predicted the “end of winter” for the year. I assumed it was an exaggeration or wishful thinking, or maybe a forecast courtesy of a particularly far-sighted groundhog. But here I am on January 26, hearing song sparrows singing against a muddy but green backdrop that could pass for late March in the Midwest.
That’s not to say that snow and ice are impossible here. We did get a week of sub-zero temps a few months ago (which a chilled classmate declared “crazy cold”). And even today, my sister occasionally has to scrape frost from her windshield when she drives home from work in the wee hours. Proper snow falls in the mountains, although both the Olympics and the Cascades are usually obscured by clouds and a blue haze. Locals even hold a polar bear plunge. But it’s disappointing to hear that numbers were low this year because of the rain.
The North Kitsap Herald sent a reporter into the rain and waves to describe a Northwestern polar bear plunge (Bainbridge Island is a well-to-do island in Kitsap County, northeast of Port Orchard and west of Seattle):
Brrringing in the New Year | 2010 Polar Bear Plunge
